The Last Picture Show

Is Steven Soderbergh really retiring?

Steven Soderbergh, who has made twenty-six feature films in twenty-four years, has just turned fifty, and he says that, after his new film, “Side Effects,” he wants to leave movies behind in order, mostly, to paint. (He has completed another film, “Behind the Candelabra,” starring Michael Douglas as Liberace and Matt Damon as his lover. According to Soderbergh, no Hollywood studio would distribute anything that juicily gay, so HBO will air it in the spring.) The first thing to say about “Side Effects” is that it isn’t a valedictory in any way, though it’s very much a Soderbergh film, an experiment in form that begins as one kind of movie and ends as something entirely different.

Initially, we seem to be watching a downbeat drama about a depressed young woman, Emily (Rooney Mara), whose husband, Martin (Channing Tatum), is just out of prison after serving a four-year term for insider trading. She throws her arms around him when she sees him, yet you couldn’t call her happy. She runs her car into a garage wall; she has stone-faced sex with Martin; she can’t keep it together at a cocktail party in which he is trying to reintroduce himself to the New York financial world. Mara has large eyes and a narrow jaw that makes them look larger; she’s slender, even slight, with a wan, weary voice. As Emily, she appears to be looking inward much of the time. Emily becomes the patient of an earnest British-born psychiatrist, Dr. Jonathan Banks (Jude Law), who prescribes antidepressants, including Ablixa (a made-up drug). Then she really starts to lose it. The whole movie is sombre: the light is gray (Soderbergh did the cinematography); New York is a city of hospitals and sterile offices. Manhattan itself seems blue.

The screenplay was written by Scott Z. Burns, who wrote “Contagion” (2011) for Soderbergh, and, for a while, we think this movie may be an attack on the pharmaceutical industry and the prescription-drug culture. But, when a murder is committed, “Side Effects” begins to change. The movie becomes a kind of sober-sided Hitchcockian thriller, featuring the master’s favorite theme: the transference of guilt. Banks falls under suspicion, from the press and from his colleagues, as an enabler. He loses his practice and becomes seedy and obsessive, and, at that point, Jude Law, whose golden youth is now a memory, digs in and gets tough. His embattled doctor turns into a ferocious detective, reconstructing everything that has happened to him and to Emily. Soderbergh directs these scenes with precision and force, and the movie holds you, even if you don’t quite believe it.

Soderbergh got going, in 1989, with “Sex, Lies, and Videotape.” That film starred an angel-faced James Spader as a smart, sensitive creep who lives in masturbatory isolation in Baton Rouge, looking at tapes he has made of women talking about sex. The picture won the Palme d’Or at Cannes, and gave American low-budget independent cinema a lift, but anyone who expected Soderbergh to become devoted to quiet, confessional filmmaking was wrong. Anyone who has expected him to do anything in particular has been wrong. He has made violent thrillers (“The Limey”), science-fiction fantasies (“Kafka,” “Solaris”), historical dramas (“Che,” “The Good German”), star vehicles (“Erin Brockovich,” “Ocean’s Eleven”), semi-incomprehensible experiments (“Schizopolis,” “Full Frontal”), scary, social-issue epics (“Traffic,” “Contagion”), and a lot more (including documentaries and TV shows), but if there’s a recurring theme or style that ties all this together I can’t find it. Soderbergh may be the ultimate example of what Steven Spielberg called the “chameleon” director, who takes his shape from the material he works with.

In the years after “Sex,” Soderbergh turned out a series of ambitious flops, including “Kafka,” which he is now attempting to reëdit, and “King of the Hill,” a lovely re-creation of growing up in the Depression-era Midwest. Soderbergh’s career was saved—commercially, at least—by “Out of Sight” (1998), a nifty crime caper with a good performance by Jennifer Lopez as a federal law officer who falls in love with George Clooney’s criminal when they’re locked in the trunk of a car. The movie had an almost screwball-comedy buoyancy to it, but it was smoother and sexier than something from the thirties; its two spectacular-looking stars created a rapt romantic bond. In Clooney, Soderbergh had found something like an alter ego—not just in “Out of Sight” but in the “Ocean’s” franchise and even in “The Good German.” Saturnine and witty ironists, the Clooney characters never give the obvious response to questions people ask them—they like to keep the world off balance so that they can plow straight through it. Soderbergh loves audacity; he likes loners, outsiders, and con men who travel light, do things for the hell of it, and outwit the literal-minded and the dull. There may be no common theme in his work, but there is a common temperament, and it’s hard not to see in his characters aspects of his own independent and, at times, ornery nature. When journalists try to pin down the real Soderbergh, he irritably shrugs them off.

Even Julia Roberts, playing the title role in “Erin Brockovich,” earnestly defending people against the polluters of Pacific Gas & Electric, seems just as eager to get in the last word as to fight the good fight. Brockovich, her breasts pushed up and partially exposed, registered people’s gaping disbelief and turned it around on them, angrily demonstrating that she was better informed and gutsier than any of her stuffy opponents. The movie proved that Soderbergh the former indie director completely understood the mechanics of commercial filmmaking and the broad appeal of a swaggering star. He framed Roberts’s performance perfectly, steering her to an Oscar and the movie to success—the worldwide theatrical gross of “Erin Brockovich” was five times its fifty-million-dollar cost. Similarly, he deftly meshed together the male stars playing relaxed, smarty-pants thieves (Clooney, Brad Pitt, Matt Damon) in the first “Ocean’s” film, in 2001, though the franchise got a little too relaxed as it went on. We always understood that the pleasure the stars took in one another’s company was a big part of the reason the film existed, and we were prepared to share in that pleasure, but by the middle of “Ocean’s Twelve,” with its scenes set at Clooney’s villa on Lake Como, it began to feel as if we were hangers-on, being taken for granted. That sour, lazy moment was the downside of Soderbergh’s screw-you independence.

At the other extreme, there were the two social-issue movies—first, the sinister and mesmerizing “Traffic” (2000), in which three parallel stories, each with its own look and style, dramatized the universality of corruption and the lethal ties of Mexican drug cartels and American users. It was the most emotionally demanding movie of Soderbergh’s career: the sight of Michael Douglas’s rage and anguish as his pretty, accomplished daughter drifted into addiction was a parent’s nightmare. The movie courted despair but then pushed it away. At the end, a lone D.E.A. agent (Don Cheadle) is left fighting a war that he knows he cannot win but is content to still be fighting. In “Contagion,” the medical professionals combatting the worldwide spread of a SARS-like pathogen again offered competence and dedication for us to hold on to. Like “Traffic,” the movie rushed through many locations, many scenes—the form was dictated by the need to connect widely spaced people in a pattern of disaster. Paranoia was never made more viscerally alive.

Why would anyone who can make movies this good want to stop making them? “By silence,” Susan Sontag wrote, an artist “frees himself from servile bondage to the world.” In Soderbergh’s case, he may be freeing himself from servile bondage to Hollywood, whose preposterously expensive and cumbersome methods he has mastered but also criticized and tried to reform with sensible, budget-cutting ideas that few people want to listen to. He fought Hollywood in practice, too, returning to independent filmmaking, working quickly and roughly with nearly plotless movies, some of them empty (“Full Frontal,” “The Girlfriend Experience”), some lightly entertaining (“Magic Mike”), some bracingly original—“Bubble” (2005), for instance, shot digitally with non-actors, is a bleak and fascinating film about alienated factory workers who turn to violence.

In “Side Effects,” the working out of the thriller plot is accomplished with too much verbal explanation. Soderbergh is a puzzle-maker, who likes jagged parts that he can fit together (many of the films have scrambled time sequences), but perhaps for this kind of story, which touches on madness, you need more of an expansively lyrical temperament—think of Hitchcock’s work in “Vertigo,” “Psycho,” and “Marnie,” and you’ll know what I mean. “Side Effects” is intelligent, but it doesn’t express much joy in filmmaking. “The tyranny of narrative is beginning to frustrate me,” Soderbergh told New York recently. I’m not convinced that he is done as a filmmaker, but he may need time to think and play with fresh ways of constructing movies. We’re willing to wait for as long as it takes. ♦

David Denby has been a staff writer and film critic at The New Yorker since 1998.